When advertising using an online advertisement service provider such as Yahoo! Search Marketing™, or performing a search using an Internet search engine such as Yahoo!™, users often wish to determine semantically related terms. Two terms, such as words or phrases, are semantically related if the terms are related in meaning in a language or in logic. Obtaining semantically related terms allows advertisers to broaden or focus their online advertisements to relevant potential customers and allows searchers to broaden or focus their Internet searches in order to obtain more relevant search results.
Various systems and methods for determining semantically related terms are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,269,361; U.S. Pat. Pub No. 2003/0055816 A1, published March 20, 2003; and U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 11/432,266 and 11/432,585, filed May 11, 2006, each of which are assigned to Yahoo! Inc. For example, in some implementations in accordance with U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 11/432,266 and 11/432,585, a system determines semantically related terms based on web pages that advertisers have associated with various terms during interaction with an advertisement campaign management system of an online advertisement service provider. In other implementations in accordance with U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 11/432,266 and 11/432,585, a system determines semantically related terms based on terms received at a search engine and a number of times one or more searchers clicked on particular universal resource locators (“URLs”) after searching for the received terms.
When implementing systems and methods such as those described in U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 11/432,266 and 11/432,585, a user is often presented with an initial set of terms. The user indicates a degree of relevance of one or more terms of the presented set of terms, and the user is then presented with a new set of terms based on the indicated degree of relevance of the terms of the initial set of terms. A user may perform this process multiple times until the user receives a sufficient number of semantically related terms. It would be desirable to develop additional systems and method for determining semantically related terms to reduce the number of times a user repeats the above-described process to receive a sufficient number of semantically related terms.